Satchel Paige had one good reason for keeping your eyes on the road ahead: “Don’t look back. Somebody might be gaining on you.”

But there’s another reason not to look back: You might see something that will turn you into a whining nuisance.

In life, we usually encounter this sort of childish behavior when someone starts talking about an ex-spouse. The equivalent in sports, is the athlete who can’t stop whining about his former team or, worse, an ex-teammate.

When that happens, it’s a guaranteed appearance among the WOW dishonorees. So let it be with our choice for Whiner of the Week, Shaquille O’Neal.

Shaq Daddy did a little rapping last week at an event. It was just off the top of his head, he said, and he was only funnin’. And it would have gone unnoticed had it happened in 1997, before everyone had a video camera on their cell phone and websites like TMZ.com and YouTube were posting every video ever taken.

But there’s no way that’s going to happen today. And Shaq should have thought of that when he started rappin’ about his old teammate, Kobe Bryant, and his failure to win a championship without Shaq playing center for him.

“Kobe couldn’t do without me,” the Diesel whined before going into a rap about how much better he is at getting divorced than Kobe is at being married — or something like that. We have to admit, we lost interest real early in this one. Grammy material it wasn’t.

We keep hoping that Shaq, who didn’t even get to the conference finals with the Suns, will get over it. We keep suspecting that 40 years from now, he’ll still be ripping on poor Kobe and then explaining that it’s all in good fun.

Maybe by then, somebody will believe him.

Dishonorable mentions:

Jerry Manuel
The Mets new manager hadn’t been sitting in Willie Randolph’s chair for a week before he was feeling feisty enough to whine about the team’s fans. After they booed reliever Aaron Heilman for the very good reason that the pitcher stunk — again — Manuel referred to the paying customers as “fertilizer.” Somebody should remind Manuel who is ultimately paying his salary before he tries that again.

Fred Wilpon
As long as we’re ripping Mets management, we may as well dispose of Wilpon, the team owner. After throwing manager Willie Randolph under the bus, Wilpon had the nerve to praise the job the ex-manager did. But, he whined, firing him was the right thing to do. To put it in baseball terms, that’s covering all the bases — as well as his backside.

Shawn Chacon
The ex-Astros’ pitcher gave a whole new meaning to the term “choke artist.” Taking a page from Latrell Sprewell’s playbook, the pitcher, who was unhappy with being sent to the bullpen just because he wasn’t a very good starter, grabbed G.M. Ed Wade by the throat in the team dining room. Wade’s offense was asking to talk to the pitcher. When Chacon refused to adjourn to the manager’s office, Wade said some unpleasant things. So Chacon tried to strangle him. It’s only a matter of time before he starts whining that no one will give him a job just because he made one little mistake — plus, he can’t pitch very well.

Justin Gimelstob
The guy’s not exactly a household name in tennis and we don’t remember him winning any grand slam singles titles, but that didn’t stop him from going on the radio and calling Anna Kournikova — the Russian who could never quite win a big title — the “B” word and then piling on some very vulgar comments. Afterwards, he produced an apology that was even more whiney than the comments. “I’m extremely disappointed in myself,” he whimpered.

Rick Dutrow
Big Brown’s trainer spent the Triple Crown season bragging about his horse, putting down other trainers, and revealing that he dosed his horses with steroids. Then Big Brown failed to run in the Belmont and Dutrow got suspended for 15 days at Churchill Downs for running a horse that was loaded with anti-asthma drugs. Naturally, he’s whining that it’s so unfair that everybody’s ganging up on him. We can’t figure out why.

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